King of the goths murders the competition, just in the Nick of time

Bernard Zuel

MAYBE it's true that if you stick around long enough, or wear a sharp suit often enough, the world finally catches up.

Nearly 40 years after beginning his career as a spidery ex-private school urchin who hurled bile and the Bible in equal measure and terrified audiences from Melbourne to Berlin to Sao Paulo, Nick Cave has earned his first number-one album.

Push The Sky Away, the 15th album by Cave and his enduring band the Bad Seeds (and the 21st studio album by Cave altogether, not counting a further 10 soundtracks) this week entered the charts at number one. That is, above pop/soul smoothie Bruno Mars, the globe-bestriding Pink and Triple J's Hottest 100 winners Macklemore & Ryan Lewis.

And it's not just us: the album is also number one in New Zealand and on at least one chart in Dallas, Texas.

If you are shocked by such mainstream success for a man who once began one song by asking, ''Hands up who wants to die?'' and released an album of murder ballads on which he ''killed'' the darling of Australian pop, Kylie Minogue, you shouldn't be. After all, this week also sees the beginning of a national tour by the UK-based Cave. Shows are sold out at prestigious venues such as the Sydney Opera House and the Sidney Myer Music Bowl.

Cave these days is far closer to the classy, venerated status of one of his influences, Leonard Cohen, than any cartoon depiction of him as king of the goths. On that note, it's worth noting that Murder Ballads, which had the triple ARIA-winning duet with Minogue, Where The Wild Roses Grow, remains Cave's best-selling album in Australia and the previous album with the Bad Seeds, 2008's Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! made it to number two in Australia and to number one in Belgium.

Advertisement

For all the excitement about a first chart-topper at the age of 55, some caution must be applied when discussing the relative success of albums. Having a number-one album does not signify either particularly large sales that week or in the long run. For a start, going to number one only means you sold the most copies that week, which could mean in a slow week four or five thousand, while in another week you might sell 10,000 and, because you come up against a behemoth like a new Pink album, not get close to number one.

Then there's the example of Melbourne/Sydney group You Am I, who in the mid-'90s had three successive albums debut at number one, but only one of them ended up selling enough to be classified platinum, that is, more than 70,000 copies.

By comparison, in this week's chart the Black Keys, Ed Sheeran, Gotye, One Direction, Taylor Swift and Guy Sebastian have all sold two or three times platinum while Pink has gone past six times platinum. And let's not even try to walk in the shadow of Adele, whose album 21 has gone 14 times platinum and still sits in the top 40 two years after release.

Still, none of them has ever murdered a national icon and got away with it.